ExtremeTech on the Future of Storage

“Surely one of the biggest success stories in technology has been the hard disk drive. Invented in the 1950s, and an absolute requirement for PCs since the mid-1980s, hard disk drives have an impressive record of increasing capacity and speed, shrinking physical size and cost, and finding new ways to shatter barriers to continued progress. […] If you think storage capacity is amazing now, take a trip with us–three to five years down the road.” ExtremeTech features a special series of four articles regarding hard drives and their future.

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10 Comments

2001-11-02 8:03 am

A very nice read on the possible future of storage. I really injoyed the part about the upcoming interface standards.

2001-11-02 8:38 am

i have a 20gig hd udma/66 (ibm) and nt4 boots in 75 (aprox) seconds. . . i think hd makers must take care of speed not in cpacity. . . as a software developer i don’t need a lot of space, i prefer a faster 20gig hd than a 130gig “same speed” hd. . . for the same price, ok.

2001-11-02 8:48 am

Shark: it’s not hd’s fault, only crap M$ os ;] I have 40GB hd and BeOS boot’s in about 20 seconds. win98se in about 35-40 seconds. when i tried w2k it booted in more than one minute ;]]]

Good that my brother wants AthlonXP so i’ll sell him it and i’ll buy Athlon Thunderbit 1,4

I should have known that letters “XP” can’t mean anything good ;]

2001-11-02 9:01 am

ok Mr. Shard

i play with BeOS about 1.5 years ago, it’s amazing. . . but i can’t force my clients to install (BeOS,) Linux or FreeBSD, i need to develop for win32. . . in other hand try to start KDE 2.1.1 (i’m using FreeBSD), run StarOffice or compile a madium size program with QT libraries. . . the HD speed is a pain in the ass.

2001-11-02 9:13 am

Pff. Storage shmorage.

I’m amazed at HD storage and and the tech behind it, but at the same time I’m astounded that a cheap solid-state solution hasn’t reached the masses. We still rely on these heavy, precision-engineered, unreliable, sensitive-to-shock and vibration hard drives. On top of that, some of the faster ones are putting out too much heat, and failure is so much more common in these devices as the temp rises.

I think it’s time for a solid-state solution…not only to get the size and weight down, but power conservation, noise-reduction and reliability up.

2001-11-02 9:18 am

A solid-state solution would be cool. But it would nead a totally new technology, after all 40GB of DRAM is pretty expensive and would need a lot of power and probably generate more heat than an hard drive!

To be honest I have a 20GB drive and I am nowhere near filling it despite have several OS’s installed. After all I dont really play games and dont work with media, I just code, and how much room do I need for code? 20GB of code is a lot!

Speed, speed and more speed, thats what I want. And quieter drives that dont vibrate as much, I can hear my computer throughout the house because of vibration and noise!

2001-11-02 9:43 am

Where’s that C60 audio tape with all my Z80 machine code :0

2001-11-02 10:52 am

Shark: I think HD speed is pretty ok. Yes, it could be even faster (like processors, each next is faster), but it’s ok now. It’s software which is slow. Slow and bloated. Your opinion is a bit similar to windoze philosophy: “It’s not our fault that windows is slow. Buy faster comp! We write shitty code but it’s hardware’s fault!” ;]

Few days ago i’ve bought new motherboard and You know what? It really pisses me off when i read in instructions that “this option is for windows 95/98/nt users…”. And it’s not only one option. There is more

2001-11-02 2:17 pm

If you’re using NT4, you may get a speed increase with your hard drive if you enable DMA. NT4 installs using hard drives in PIO mode. Download dmacheck.exe from somewhere on Microsoft’s site. You’ll also have to sit through a warning window that makes it seem like the world will explode if you enable DMA, but it’s worth it.